Jacman

halmcelroy · 2005-12-08 05:33:58

Hi All,
I am a long time Arch fan who generally lurks around in the forum reading posts off and on.
I am a Java programmer by trade and was intrigued by a post about Jacman. Since the post was originally about Archie, and already there was a significant discussion of Jacman in there, I didnt want to pollute the thread further, hence this new post.

I am interested in helping out with the application, if any help is needed. Please let me know if there is anything that I can help out with. Also arooaroo mentioned about the app losing out to inferior gtk ones due to its Java nature. I was wondering if using a native widget toolkit like SWT would ameliorate the situation a little.

Keep up the good work!

Hal

dtw · 2005-12-08 08:57:29

Hal McElroy? That is one COOL name...

Jacman has a project at berlios.de - contact through there would be the "better" option I reckon

arooaroo · 2005-12-08 09:33:29

Ooo, "ameliorate". Now there's a word you don't hear everyday.

Hal, thanks for the interest. If you wish to contribute then I'd suggest that the first step would be to become familiar with the code in the CVS at the moment to see if you want to jump aboard. If you do, then register as a user at berlios.de, pm me your username and I'll add you to the project.

That said, there's a last minute attempt to finish off v0.3. It's a fairly subtle upgrade: key feature will be its multilingual support. So, it's not dying just yet.

The suggestion for using SWT is a valid one but is one I will not pursue. It's not really about the widget toolkit - it's merely that Jacman runs on a Java runtime.

Dusty · 2005-12-08 17:29:13

arooaroo wrote:

it's merely that Jacman runs on a Java runtime.

Basically he's saying a lot of people think Java is slow because they read it somewhere on the web once.

There's also a group of people who think Java is crap because its open source.

These are very narrow-minded people.

Dusty

dtw · 2005-12-08 17:46:49

You gotta admit that JRE startup time is kinda slow!

halmcelroy · 2005-12-08 20:16:13

yeah, C does seem the fastest

dibble: there was this old murder series that I used to watch that when the credits rolled, had some guy named "Hal McElroy" show up. Liked the name so I made it my alias.

I was gonna say gcj, but awt support is poor, so I think the app still has to contend with the JRE.

arooaroo: will register on the berli.os site and let you know what I think.

Thanks all,

Hal

arooaroo · 2005-12-08 21:22:56

It's not so much the JRE that's the killer. As Dusty showed, 0.1s to get the thing up and running aint bad. It's the initial class-loading that takes its time. Getting a GUI "Hello World" is much more expensive because there are dozens and dozens of objects that have to get initialised due the use of inheritance and MVC model. So, you have objects like JLabel, but that extends JComponent. Of course, JLabel doesn't actually render the label, that's passed on to a UI delegate, etc, etc.

However, that said, I use non-Java apps that take there time too.

arooaroo · 2005-12-08 21:24:02

Dusty wrote:

Java programs are fine when running. They're just not much fun to code.... ;-)

You haven't worked on the Jacman project though! It's a ball!

xerxes2 · 2005-12-09 01:54:16

sun was on my ignorelist before when they were a ms puppy but nowadays they seems to be back on track again

if they oss java they will piss off ms even more

arooaroo · 2005-12-09 10:42:45

Isn't it cool how everyone must have exactly the same PC specs so that the comparing of time stats makes sense.

Back on topic... performance is an issue for me as much as many people. However, I'm not going to lose sleep if Java's a few hundreths of a second slower to load up a main screen than a py-gtk program, or whatever lang/UI toolkit you choose to mention.

The next release of Java (which I've been testing for another project at work) is very promising and definitely improves the experience for GUI apps further. That said, I don't find Jacman sluggish.

I've tried the other Pacman front-ends and performance is also an issue. It's not a language bottleneck, it's an IO bottleneck caused by the large amount hassle you need to give the filesystem in order to show the user the package info.

Now, let's get some perspective. If I was asked to write a Hello World program, I wouldn't write it in Java. But, if I was asked to make a complex GUI, then I would.

On an optimistic note, I do believe that Sun will open source their Java implementation - although it may take a year or two.

phrakture · 2005-12-09 16:20:23

I removed all the language timing posts, and threw them in the programming forum. Sorry for the tangent arooaroo

arooaroo · 2005-12-09 17:54:06

Phrak kindly split the Hello World benchmarks to another thread. Any chance of someone doing the same with the language debate?

Ta

phrakture · 2005-12-09 19:11:49

Ok, ok I split it - I apologize for hijacking once again 8)

/me points at Dusty
"BUT MOM! IT WAS HIS FAULT!"

T-Dawg · 2005-12-09 20:02:51

I'm going to bet 50 bucks right now this thread will get split a third time.

Please, for the love of god, stay on topic. If you wish to fight about your programming language do it here:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=16977

codergeek42 · 2005-12-09 20:11:57

Dusty wrote:

There's also a group of people who think Java is crap because its open source.

Erm. No. I think you meant "not open source". Sun's JRE/JDK is proprietary, as are other builds (such as Blackdown's ports etc.)

Dusty · 2005-12-10 06:06:04

of course that's what I mean. Funny nobody else noticed. :-S

Dusty · 2005-12-10 06:07:19

Penguin wrote:

I'm going to bet 50 bucks right now this thread will get split a third time.

I want a $25 fee for being the guy that causes the split.. Isn't it amazing that as soon as I have free time you poor mods are being overworked and the split button starts to smoke??

Dusty

rezza · 2005-12-10 12:01:25

Dusty wrote:

of course that's what I mean. Funny nobody else noticed. :-S

That's because he's codergeek, and open source is his very nourishment. The man needs no more food or drink than RMS's ideologies

(Hi codergeek, didn't know you were an archer, left fedora at last? )

Dusty · 2005-12-10 19:45:42

codergeek has been around here for a while, IIRC.

arooaroo · 2005-12-10 19:48:19

Dusty: I noticed, but it was so obvious what you meant that I didn't feel compelled to post a correction at the time.

Anyway, it looks like we have another contributor, welcome halmcelroy. He mentioned that the Jacman code could really do with some comments (oops!) which will be his first task (he volunteered!) This is just as well because I just checked and Jacman has ~5300+ lines of code (that's actual lines of code that do something and not just number of lines in all the source files).

Dang! I never thought it was so big. I will do some maintanence after the next release because there's plenty of refactoring I could do to improve code reuse. Still, I tend to chase the functionality rather than writing the world's most elegant code - I'm a subscriber to Knuth's theory about avoiding premature optimisation.

More contributors are welcome.

Dusty · 2005-12-10 19:58:06

Woot, comments! I love Javadoc!

arooaroo, shame on you for going on topic.

I'm pretty good at refactoring, let me know if you want advice. I'm not taking on this project since I don't want to cheat on my preferred language... ;-) Maybe you could use refactoring tools built into netbeans or eclipse...

Then again, compare the number of lines of code to one of the python equivalents.... :-D

Dusty

arooaroo · 2005-12-10 20:54:10

Dusty wrote:

Then again, compare the number of lines of code to one of the python equivalents.... :-D

But it's not like-for-like! Jacman is so much better than the Python equivalents

Nah, jk. The reason why Jacman is larger is because it's not trying to be a synaptic clone, i.e., single window. By having specific dialogs for specific tasks you get more code - but I think the result is much better and easier to use.

Plus, there's all the UI code to make the app look distinct; search-as-type searching; console viewer to display pacman's ncurses output, etc, etc.

Man, I wish Jacman came out before who ditched Java - I could have done with your skills. Ah well. I'll keep at it until our efforts win you over again!

Dusty · 2005-12-11 00:05:41

Yeah, or until you switch over to Python. ;-) I don't have time even for the projects I am interested in lately. It really sucks. I've been coding C++ for the past two hours and I hate it. Why am I not working on magnum or something!? :'(

Dusty

codergeek42 · 2005-12-11 07:47:57

rezza wrote:

(Hi codergeek, didn't know you were an archer, left fedora at last? )

I was an Archer until I switched back to Gentoo Fedora after about a week.

arooaroo · 2005-12-12 19:22:23

codergeek42 wrote:

rezza wrote:
(Hi codergeek, didn't know you were an archer, left fedora at last? )
I was an Archer until I switched back to Gentoo Fedora after about a week.

What does this mean? Are you saying that you're not an Archer, but just hanging around on the forums because we're all just so damn cool?

Also, what's "Gentoo Fedora". Sounds goddam awful!

Arch Linux

#1 2005-12-08 05:33:58

Jacman

#2 2005-12-08 08:57:29

Re: Jacman

#3 2005-12-08 09:33:29

Re: Jacman

#4 2005-12-08 17:29:13

Re: Jacman

#5 2005-12-08 17:46:49

Re: Jacman

#6 2005-12-08 20:16:13

Re: Jacman

#7 2005-12-08 21:22:56

Re: Jacman

#8 2005-12-08 21:24:02

Re: Jacman

#9 2005-12-09 01:54:16

Re: Jacman

#10 2005-12-09 10:42:45

Re: Jacman

#11 2005-12-09 16:20:23

Re: Jacman

#12 2005-12-09 17:54:06

Re: Jacman

#13 2005-12-09 19:11:49

Re: Jacman

#14 2005-12-09 20:02:51

Re: Jacman

#15 2005-12-09 20:11:57

Re: Jacman

#16 2005-12-10 06:06:04

Re: Jacman

#17 2005-12-10 06:07:19

Re: Jacman

#18 2005-12-10 12:01:25

Re: Jacman

#19 2005-12-10 19:45:42

Re: Jacman

#20 2005-12-10 19:48:19

Re: Jacman

#21 2005-12-10 19:58:06

Re: Jacman

#22 2005-12-10 20:54:10

Re: Jacman

#23 2005-12-11 00:05:41

Re: Jacman

#24 2005-12-11 07:47:57

Re: Jacman

#25 2005-12-12 19:22:23

Re: Jacman

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